Polaris Project

Envisioning a world where every human being maintains the dignity to choose how they live and work, Polaris aims to end sex and labor trafficking and help victims and survivors reclaim their freedom, while also transforming the systems that make trafficking possible.

To accomplish our goals, Polaris’s strategies include both responding to the immediate needs of victims and survivors and working to prevent trafficking before it happens. At the core of our work is the Trafficking Hotline, which enables us to connect victims, survivors, and those supporting them to needed services, resources, and other assistance.

Furthermore, each contact sheds light on how trafficking works — and how Polaris can help intervene in situations of trafficking and stop it from happening in the first place. By analyzing data generated through the Trafficking Hotline, we know that reducing and ultimately preventing trafficking requires advocating for policies, practices, and resources that address the vulnerabilities that enable the crime, whether poverty, gender-based violence, migration, abuse, systemic racism, or unstable housing.

These dual prongs of response and prevention are integrated throughout our work , which includes Direct Response; Research, Intelligence, and Data Analysis; and Campaigns and Advocacy. All of this work is not only informed by survivors but is growing more centered around them as the true experts of the anti-trafficking movement.

Survivor centered, justice and equity driven, and technology enabled, Polaris has established itself as a national leader and technical expert on human trafficking, knitting together the fabric of the country’s anti-trafficking movement. Our unique capacities include:

- A FOUNDATION FOR THE FIGHT: The Trafficking Hotline is the centralized system for human trafficking response in the U.S. Countless organizations, businesses, media outlets, and elected leaders refer those in need and those supporting them to the Trafficking Hotline, and Polaris plays a pivotal role in directing them to local resources. Information flows both ways, too: Using Trafficking Hotline data, Polaris observes trends and learns best practices that are shared back out to advance the entire field.

- SCOPE AND SCALE FOR SOLUTIONS: Polaris approaches efforts against trafficking from all angles, tackling sex and labor trafficking, serving children to adults, and delivering a spectrum of services from frontline response to working with financial institutions, policymakers, and technology experts to disrupt and prevent trafficking. And as a national organization, our size and scope have the potential to multiply the efforts of smaller service providers, bridging local impact with the scope and skills to reduce and end trafficking at the scale of the problem.

- TRUST AND TRUE PARTNERSHIP: Polaris has helped make human trafficking a nationally recognized issue over the past two decades. During that time, we have also built a reputation as a trustworthy resource, as well as trusting relationships with survivor leaders and public and private decision makers on both sides of the political aisle. Our intentionally collaborative structure has served as a model for many state and local anti-trafficking coalitions, making Polaris part of the origin story not only of the national movement but of local initiatives as well.

Since its founding in 2002, Polaris has evolved from primarily offering victims’ services to driving the nascent national movement to prevent sex and labor trafficking by addressing the systems that make communities vulnerable to exploitation. In its first two decades, Polaris has marked the following milestones:

- Launching the TRAFFICKING HOTLINE and serving as the first and only operator, assisting more than 30,000 victims and survivors across all 50 states, U.S. territories, and 179 countries.
- Creating a coordinated NORTH AMERICAN SAFETY NET with Canadian and Mexican national human trafficking hotlines.
- Developing a SURVIVOR EMPOWERMENT INITIATIVE, hiring 175+ survivor consultants to work on a range of projects.
- Conducting the first-of-its-kind NATIONAL SURVIVOR STUDY, an innovative, scientifically rigorous research project designed in partnership with survivors.
- Delivering TRAINING for more than 200,000 stakeholders, including nonprofits, law enforcement, corporations, financial institutions, government agencies, faith communities, and the general public.
- Creating dozens of BRIEFS AND DATA REPORTS, including “The Typology of Modern Slavery” that identifies 25 types of human trafficking.
- Helping found the ALLIANCE TO END SLAVERY AND TRAFFICKING national advocacy coalition and leading efforts to pass five federal and over 100 state laws in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Moving forward, Polaris is doubling down on:
- Strengthening frontline response by upgrading and resourcing the Trafficking Hotline to make sure that everyone who finds themselves in a situation of exploitation can get help through terms, timing, and methods that work best for them.
- Developing deeper analysis and intelligence capacity to leverage data assets and power the anti-trafficking movement’s knowledge needs.
- Promoting long-term prevention and survivor economic development by facilitating city-based safety net expansion and criminal justice reform, improving migrant worker recruitment and labor conditions, and cutting off traffickers’ access to financial services.
- Centering survivors as the leaders and experts in the fight against human trafficking, from program design and narrative change campaigns to data research and policy recommendations.